Numeric and symbolic evaluation of the pfaffian of general skew-symmetric matrices
Description
Abstract Evaluation of pfaffians arises in a number of physics applications, and for some of them a direct method is preferable to using the determinantal formula. We discuss two methods for the numerical evaluation of pfaffians. The first is tridiagonalization based on Householder transformations. The main advantage of this method is its numerical stability that makes unnecessary the implementation of a pivoting strategy. The second method considered is based on Aitkenʼs block diagonalization formula... Title of program: Pfaffian Catalogue Id: AEJD_v1_0 Nature of problem Evaluation of the pfaffian of a skew symmetric matrix. Evaluation of pfaffians arises in a number of physics applications involving fermionic mean field wave functions and their overlaps. Versions of this program held in the CPC repository in Mendeley Data AEJD_v1_0; Pfaffian; 10.1016/j.cpc.2011.04.025 This program has been imported from the CPC Program Library held at Queen's University Belfast (1969-2018)